Shadows In The Sky
by JDCorley
Summary: In a golden age of air pirates and transport zeps, where will the Maximum Ride kids end up? Only twofisted private eye Drake Merlin knows...A case of murder in a Crimson Skies and Maximum Ride crossover. Part Three up, and the plot thickens!
1. A Decent Start

The wind whipped past us. 

The engines screamed, the props howling like banshees. Barnaby's coiffed, curly black hair was spastically flinging itself arond the top of his reddened face. He tried to level the pistol at me, but the wind kept ripping his arm upwards. He hung onto the top wing of the biplane with white knuckles. "Give me the parachute, Merlin!" he shouted.

"It was you all along, Barnaby!" I shouted back. "You were the one behind the Monumental Pictures payroll caper! And you would have gotten away clean too except for one thing...the dame. The dame wanted a slice of the cake! And when Mackleroy found out, you had to kill him!"

"Give me the parachute now, or I'll shoot!" he shrieked. I held the parachute in front of me. He wouldn't dare shoot so long as it was there, for fear of tearing a hole in it.

The engine burst into flames, smoke pouring upwards. I couldn't even hear Barnaby anymore. The diving planes of the militia shot downwards towards us through the clouds, too high, too late. Far below the sea looked blue and clean. I felt the wing tearing apart under my feet and I went somersaulting away into the air. The last I saw of Barnaby was through the oily smoke as I struggled into the parachute, his mouth open wide and dark like a scar, bullets arcing up towards me as he fired and fired and fired...

It was a decent start.

_The Great Depression splintered America like it was made of glass, a dozen nations springing from the wreckage. **Crimson** are the **Skies** over the Nation of Hollywood as air pirates, militias, and transport zeppelins clash in a golden age of aviation!_

_A mysterious scientific organization created and manipulated human life - some of their highest triumphs? Children raised with wings, the ability to fly and other powers! Some have escaped from their torturous imprisonment under the tutelage of their self-named leader. Although she's only a teenaged girl, **Maximum Ride** flees with them from mysterious and bizarre pursuers..._

SHADOWS IN THE SKY  
A Maximum Ride and Crimson Skies Story

**I. A Decent Start**

The Monumental job was the one that put me on the map. My little office was flooded with calls after that. My secretary Angelica was not impressed. "If you can get me three paychecks in a row that won't bounce," she said, dropping the newspaper on my desk, "THAT would be worth a headline."

Jerzey Cafferty was one of the nine hundred vice presidents of Monumental Pictures and he had suspected someone of skimming off the payroll. The LAPD had their hands full with breaking up an Arixo spy ring so it fell to private dicks like myself to handle little things like a half a million dollars going missing. It turned out that David Barnaby, a stuntman and fugitive from the Industrial States had rigged the game. One thing about movie companies, they knew how to get your picture out there. The picture of Jerzey and me in front of a big canvas sack stuffed with Nation of Hollywood greenbacks was on the front page of every rag from here to the Colorado Free State.

I picked up a nice chunk of those greenbacks and Cafferty got promoted, even though he was still a vice president.

All that changed about two weeks afterwards. I unlocked the outer door and came in to collect the mail and put the coffee on. Angelica wouldn't be there for another hour. I opened the inner door and found a man lying on my office floor.

He'd been shot, and not too long ago either, the blood was staining the rug but had not spread to the wooden floor. I turned him over.

I hadn't seen Renoit since the war, the last time I had laid eyes on him he was walking back into the French cafe we had both just walked out of, his goggles pushed back on his head, a bottle of red wine in his hand, and a beautiful blonde woman under his arm. He was singing. The Armistice had been signed that day.

"Renoit." I said, trying to stay calm. I fumbled for the telephone, jiggled the cradle, the operator said "Hold the line." It was busy in my building. Businessmen were making money."

"Merlin." he moaned. "It shot me."

"Who shot you?" I asked.

"Samedi Dimanche." he said.

"Who?"

"Non. Not who. Samedi Dimanche. Samedi Dimanche." he insisted, his voice coming in a croak now, his hands formed into claws at my lapels, held on hard. "Samedi Dimanche."

There was blood on my hands when the police arrived, so they arrested me. Renoit never saw the inside of a hospital. The ambulance just took him straight to the morgue.


	2. An Awful Racket

An Awful Racket

The police station was not like it was in the serials. The pictures used City Hall for the exteriors, pretended that every lousy cop barn in Los Angeles was a monolithic, grey, pillared edifice, ancient and unmatchable. In reality, most of the cop shops were ramshackle two-stories with the cells the only part that wouldn't fall over in a high wind. No federal bucks to build it since the feds collapsed.

I wasn't in a jail cell, which meant they didn't really think I'd done it. Still, Lieutenant Hawks and myself had gotten sideways before, and he took any opportunity to lean on me. "What did he want?" he asked, sneering. Hawks was a big-shouldered former football player who couldn't make it in pictures since his face had gotten busted in a cross-tackle. He still was in good shape and his suit fit him a lot better than mine did.

"I don't know."

"You got a gun, don't you?"

"I don't like guns, they make an awful racket."

"You got one registered to you."

I shrugged. "It's at my home. Check it if you want, it hasn't been fired by me."

"We'll see about that." Lieutenant Hawks said. "So this guy who you haven't seen since the war turns up dead on your office carpet. That's your story."

"Maybe he saw me in the papers and decided to look me up." I said. "You do know how to read, don't you, Hawks?"

He grabbed my hair and pulled up hard. "Look." he said. "If we find out you had anything to do with this..."

"I didn't." I said, squirming in pain. "What's with the strongarm act?"

"The word's come down from Dunbar's office that we're to clamp down on violence in the city. Hard to convince people the Nation of Hollywood is the shining city on the hill when they're croaking each other in the streets." Hawks sneered. But he let me go.

"Open your eyes." I told Hawks. "Every Mexican from here to Sinaloa wants to get into the Nation. If Dunbar's so hot to get immigrants to the Nation of Hollywood, he can just give them some papers."

I hadn't noticed the guy before, but Hawks had someone else sitting near enough his desk to overhear. He said, "Undesirables." like it was four words. The man was slender, tall, wearing a five hundred dollar suit like he was used to wearing five hundred dollar suits. His face was pale but his hands were sunburned - he clearly wore his wide-brimmed hat everywhere he went.

I looked at him oddly. "I thought you worked alone, Hawks." I said.

"Shut up, Merlin." said Hawks.

The man leaned forward. "You were a pilot in the Great War." he said. "With the deceased."

"I don't fly anymore." I said.

"Did he know that?" asked Hawks.

"I never talked to him. I told you that."

"Oh yeah." Hawks said with a sneer. "You told me that."

The man with Hawks stood up and walked away. Hawks' radio on his desk squawked and played static. He folded his arms and glared at me.

"Did he tell you anything before he died?" he said, eyeing me shrewdly.

I kept my face calm. "Samedi Dimanche." I said casually. "That means 'Saturday Lunchtime'."

"What happens on Saturday at lunchtime?" Hawks said.

I shrugged. "I eat lunch. What about you?"

Hawks shook his head. "Maybe he meant last Saturday." he said. "Did anything happen last Saturday?"

"I spent last Saturday at Monumental Pictures interviewing half-naked starlets about the payroll job. I could give you their names but a gentleman never tells."

"Shut up." Hawks said again. "Just keep your trap shut."

A couple of hours later, I could go. They'd found my gun at home and determined it hadn't been fired.

What I hadn't told Hawks was that I had an inkling of what 'Samedi Dimanche' meant and it had nothing to do with what it translated as. Renoit loved to spend his Saturday afternoons gambling, and he had said that if he ever won what he really wanted, a boat, he would name it after the time that he won it.

I waved down a yellow cab and said, "Take me to the docks." The driver spoke little English and he kept the radio on a Spanish language station, so I didn't understand any of the music either. We rolled through the busy streets of Hollywood, planes flitting by overhead, the skyscrapers and apartment buildings towering above, luxury zeppelins marked with the insignia of a dozen studios slowly trundled by, their shadows slowly passing over us.

I'd helped Gat Austringer keep his job at the Dockmasters' office after he was strongarmed by a gang of Sea Haven gun runners. Ever since then he'd been wondering if whether it had been worth it. I didn't feel great about leaning on him as much as I did, but he was in a position to help me out when nobody else could.

"You can't be in here, Merlin." he whined, as he let me into his office. Austringer was short, pudgy, but with a moviestar face and sharp blue eyes. He was no Hercules, but you could see why his wife, who was a knockout in every way, would like him.

"I'm after a ship, come on." I said. "It has nothing to do with you."

"There's published notices." Austringer said, folding his arms.

"I want to know who might not have made it onto the published notices." I said. "The guys out beyond the seven-mile limit. The guys you snap pictures of for the militia intel program."

"We gotta catch pirate gunboats before they steam into the harbor and knock the place over." Austringer said.

"I don't disagree." I said, putting my arm around his shoulder. "I'm on your side, remember?"

"Fine." he grumbled. He took out a folder from the desk and started leafing through photographs.

"It would have arrived within the last seven days, and may be named the 'Samedi Dimanche'." I said.

He flipped the folder shut and leapt to his feet. "Who sent you?" he demanded shrilly.

"Austringer, what's going on?" I said. "A client mentioned the name, that's all. I figured you might..."

He was poking his finger into my chest, as scared as I had ever seen him. "Two goons came by here last week, they took all my pictures of the Samedi Dimanche and went over them with a magnifying glass. They told me not to tell anyone about it. They threatened me, threatened my family! I don't want to go down that road again."

"Did they say who they were from?" I said. "Were you able to tell anything else about them?"

"Cajuns." he said. Well, that was just great, the dumbest, meanest bandits on the continent were wrapped up in this thing.

"I'm telling you the truth, Austringer." I said, taking his shoulders in my hands and looking him in the eye. "I didn't have any idea about those guys when I came in here."

"Okay." Austringer said, relaxing a little. "You know I can't put my family in danger."

"They are in danger, Austringer. You know I can help you out, like I did before."

He nodded, then crossed to a file cabinet and took out a file. "I didn't give them the negatives. Here are duplicates of the pictures."

They were blurry, like they were taken through fog, and the lighting was bad, but they showed an old shrimper with a jerry-rigged landing strip atop it. Painted on the side was 'Samedi Dimanche', clear as day, the only thing about the picture that was in focus. It would have looked like paradise to me when I was in the service.

"Where are these rocks?" I said. "Show me on your chart."


	3. Keep Moving

I could have flown out in five minutes but I didn't like getting behind the stick anymore. I hired a crummy flat bay taxi from a service and chugged outwards. The wind whipped across the choppy water, I leaned back against the fishing chair and held the wheel with gloves on. Out here, you could look to either side and see Los Angeles stretching out in either direction up and down the coast as far as you could want, see the cargo zeps docked at the warehouses, see the stream of planes and copters buzzing through the skyscrapers and above the rows of identical suburban houses. You could see the statue of Dunbar being built in the harbor, his arms open as if to welcome all the ships and planes that could get past him. Unless, I reflected, they belonged to 'undesirables', meaning Mexicans. I pulled my coat tighter around me. 

The Samedi Dimanche was out past the seven mile limit. It was in the same place where it had been before, anchored just behind a cluster of rocks coated with seagull guano and a few sprays of multicolored lichen, Nature's graffiti. It looked abandoned, but as I found out when I moved the launch up next to the ladder, it was anything but. A shotgun blast fired off above me, and I looked up to see a black-haired woman racking the slide and pointing it down at me. "Keep moving." she said. "Right on back to the shore."

"I'm here about Renoit." I said, putting my hands up. "I don't want any trouble."

"No trouble if you keep moving." she said. The shotgun barrel, still curling with the smoke of her first shot, pointed unwaveringly down.

"Renoit came to see me. I'm Drake Merlin." I said. "Private investigator."

"...where's Renoit?" she said.

"He's dead." I said. "He was shot in my office."

There was a pause. "The police are investigating, but I wanted to see what he wanted." I said. "He and I were..."

"I know. The war." she said. "The damn war, everything is the damn war." Her voice was taking on an accent I didn't quite recognize, not quite Mexican.

A moment passed where there was nothing but the sound of the ocean, the creaking of the boats, the stretching of the ropes, the chugging of my idling engine. Finally she moved back. "I still got the shotgun." she called out. "Cut your engine and come on up. Slow."

I did. She grabbed the back of my coat collar and dragged me up on deck when I got close. It was the first look I got at her. She was a big woman, with big hands, wide shoulders, big chested, big-hipped. Her skin was dark brown, not quite African, but darker than Mexican, her eyes were chocolate and incongrously innocent given that she had a shotgun on me. "Coat off, hands up." she said, and patted me down quickly. In my wallet, she checked my PI card, saw my gun license peeking out from behing my drivers' license. "Where's your pistol?" she asked.

"At home." I said. "The cops had to check it out since he died in my office."

"And?" she said.

"I ain't in jail, am I?"

"I don't have a lot of confidence in Dunbar's goons." she said, and there was a bit of flutter behind her voice. She slowly lowered the shotgun. "He's really dead?"

"I'm sorry." I said, and that was all she could take. Tears started to stream down her face, blown by the ocean wind, dried before they got half down her cheeks. Sobs came from her throat. Her hand gripped the shotgun as it dangled and her knuckles paled with the exertion of it.

The ship creaked in a new way. I turned and looked, saw the impossible, a dark-haired girl leaning on the deck of the boat as she came up from a belowdecks cabin on wooden stairs. She seemed weak, pale, a bandage wrapped her body. But the main thing I noticed was the wings. Big, feathery things, white as the clouds above us getting pushed along by the wind from the sea. "Maria?" she said. "What...what's wrong?"

"Max." she choked. "No, get back down...he can't..."

I was dumbfounded, I didn't know what to say. Max, if that's who she was, said, "Maria, if this is who Renoit went to find...he can help us. We have to trust him."

"Renoit...but Renoit is dead, Max...he was killed." Maria said helplessly. "What, what does it matter now?"

Another moment passed between them. Max clearly cared for Renoit, although she wasn't as torn up as Maria was. "...I don't know, but...the situation's still the same, isn't it? We have to trust Mr. Merlin, that's what Renoit said, wasn't it?"

Maria nodded. She put the shotgun in a loop of leather near the tiller of the ship, where it was close at hand but wouldn't fall over.

"What the hell's going on?" I asked.

"I'll...explain." Maria said, looking up at the empty sky as if expecting Renoit to be there himself, reaching down for her.


End file.
